this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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And another question: did someone already lay out a roadmap to google's collapse?
Right now we're going through a financial crisis, big tech needs to start making proper money so they try to squeeze the users. Google hopes to "drm the internet" to maximise ad revenue. Let's assume they succeed. 3 years from now the dystopia of dead adblockers is live, google and other leeches make bank off ads.
But there's no more adblockers and no more ad revenue left to squeeze out (because every internet user is already chained to a screen and force fed ads within ads). And shareholders demand increase in profits. What do they do then? Is there any hint of a long-term strategy? How long before the maximum theoretical ad revenue is reached and plateaus? Then COVID29 or something comes, fed raises rastes again and...?
You’re describing the inherent limitations of capitalism. Our entire economy is predicated on infinite growth, which doesn’t exist and isn’t possible. What you describe is the eventual collapse of not just organizations, but of the US as a whole.
No, not the US as a whole, but perhaps the end of the insane and without reasonable measures Capitalism that it has spawned. This is the theorized late-stage capitalism, but it was brought to this level by a broken and out of control system, whereas the academic model of capitalism would have had certain mechanisms of balance to prevent exactly where we are.
The system of the present is too imbalanced to function with all these corporations, conglomerates, and billionaires holding a disproportionate amount of the wealth and keeping it from circulating. The economic system in the US just can't work this way, so some drastic shift to reduce or remove the wealth gap will need to change.
Capitalism doesn't require infinite growth. This is some trite line that was invented on Twitter and became the common wisdom in online discussions about the failings of current national and global economic systems. It's not true. It appears to be true that the current model of capitalism favored the globe over requires infinite growth, but the current implementation of capitalism is not the same as it has always been implemented or will always be. There are more than enough legitimate criticisms of both capitalism writ large as well as current systems, we should be directing our ire through those arguments and not one that is factually false.
I suspect the argument is that capitalism is fueled by desire, which is psychologically insatiable. Some would probably say that any system allowing capitalism will eventually be corrupted by it and lead back to the infinite growth capitalism we currently live in. It's the belief that we have to totally extinguish it or it will come back stronger.
Good. Let's fucking get it over with.
You can sit in front of a computer using almost zero new resources while coding an application which you then sell to a megacorporation for 30 billion. The "inifite growth with limited resources" -argument doesn't hold.